Roger Scruton: The Health and Safety culture is killing volunteeering and the benefits of risk

By Roger Scruton

The Conservative Party has rightly emphasized that it is civil society, not the state, that is the source of our shared values and our public spirit. Each function that is taken over by the state ends up in the hands of the bureaucrats. And the bigger the bureaucracy the more prone it is to invasion by special interests. That, in brief, is why the private schools in this country are succeeding in their education task, while the state schools are failing. To return our institutions to civil society, to encourage the emergence of a new generation of volunteers, to liberate the charitable impulse – these are the paradigm conservative causes, and the long-term goal of all the initiatives we might take to ‘get the state off our backs’. It is not that we want the state to be weak, but that we want civil society to be strong.

There are many obstacles to this cause, including the vast number of state-dependent clients, who lobby in the name of ‘compassion’.  New Labour greatly increased the number of these people, recognising that their vote would always tend in a socialist direction. But there is a more insidious obstacle, and one that is not often noticed because it seems so paradoxical to be opposed to it. The name of this obstacle is ‘health and safety’.

Civil society exists only where individuals have the courage and initiative to get things started. Sports teams, festivals, fairs and markets; shelters, dance-clubs and equestrian events; schools, colleges, scout troops and children’s outings – all these things, which are the stuff of civil society, are now tied in regulatory knots. Activities involving children have been effectively removed from the competence of ordinary unqualified people; playgrounds have been closed for fear of improbable accidents; premises where the Women’s Institute might have run a cake stall, or where teenagers could have got together for a dance, have been condemned by the health inspectors, and scarcely an activity now occurs in the countryside which does not have to be carried out in some clandestine version, for fear of the bureaucrats whose job it is to snoop on us.